Seems petty. Mozilla is one of the most pure open source projects out there in mission, ethos, and product. Addons are user choices, and trying to limit that choice is self defeating in free speech.
A few weeks ago Nightly ended up having "Pocket" integrated, and rumour said it would replace Mozilla's own open source Sync plus the integrated Reader.
Addons will soon no longer be able to be installed unless approved by Mozilla. (Another walled garden. Sigh...)
Bullshit. The add-on signing requirement will be able to be easily disabled. It's just as much of a "walled garden" as Debian's repos are (ie. nothing like a walled garden).
I believe you are talking about the big red boxes that mention it has "Non Free Addons". This is what is known as an "AntiFeature" in F-Droid [0]. It is not a reason to exclude a project from the main repository. Rather, it is purely a piece of metadata that is shown on the website and in the client to let people know that it is a thing.
The goal is to provide as much information as possible to users, so that they can make educated choices about which software they choose to install on their device.
[0] - https://f-droid.org/manual/html_node/AntiFeatures.html
you still can install ALL the same addons on fennec as you can on official firefox.
can you people, please, stop talking before reading anything official? the very own page for the new build warn about unsafe addons! https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=firefox&fdid...
now, here is the official list of what is removed [with my comments]:
Removed: Tests [not sure about that]
Removed: Crashreporter [tracking]
Removed: Healthreporter (UI?)
Removed: Mediastreaming (requires non-free library: play-services) [google's binary blobs]
Removed: Updater [tracking]
Removed: EME/DRM [adobe's binary blob]
Added: MultiLocales [tracking. what is some 100kb of text when you now don't have to tell play store your locale?]